68 prises, regarded him as the ideal overseer In April of 1990, however, First Net- work was abruptly closed by California banking regulators, and the Resolution Trust Corporation (R.T.C.), the federal agency created to cope with the nation- wide savings-and-Ioan crisis, moved in to liquidate its assets. Rheuban soon filed for personal bankruptcy, and was report- ed to be the subject of a criminal-fraud investigation. With no forewarning, Jay discovered that he could not even gain access to his own office without first re- ceiving permission from self-important bureaucrats who didn't know Malini from minestrone, The irony of this was unbearable. Had Ricky Jay, of all people, been victimized by a high-stakes con game? If Rheuban did commit crimes, the government has yet to persuade a grand jury that they were transgressions worthy of an indictment. Nor does Jay at this point have a desire to know how, pre- cisely, First Network came undone. Re- gardless of what was going on inside the bank, Jay had felt that his working ar- rangement with Rheuban was basically satisfactory. Though they have not spo- ken in almost two years, he expresses no bitterness toward his former employer and benefactor. For the functionaries of the R.T.C., however, he harbors deep contempt. Because Rheuban's personal insolvency was enmeshed with the bank's insolvency, the fate of the Mul- holland Library was for many months suspended in legal limbo Brian Walton, an attorney and friend of Jay's, who ad- vised him during the fiasco, has said, "When you look at the question of the ownership of the library, the moral own- ership was clearly in Ricky's hands. The financial owner- ship was obviously elsewhere. But, of course, artists will often become divorced from what they create. Every day, there would be one yahoo or another messing with what were, in a moral sense, Ricky's treasures. One day, Ricky came by the library and there were some government people videotaping the collection for inventory purposes. And they'd just placed their equipment wherever they felt like it. Ricky looked at one guy and said, 'Get your stuff off those posters.' And the guy said, 'I'm So-and-So, from the F.B.I.' And Ricky said, 'I don't care who the fuck you are. Get your crap off those posters.' " The outlandishness of the situation was compounded by the fact that the Mulholland Library proved to be a splendid investment-the only asset in the First Network bankruptcy which had appreciated significantly. After a year and a half of what Jay regarded as neglect and mismanagement, the R.T.C. finally put it up for sale at auc- tion. The day before the auction, which was to be presIded over by a bankruptcy judge in a downtown courtroom, Jay gave me my first and last glimpse of the collection, which was still in Century City. In the building lobby, on our way to what had been First Network's offices, on the fifth floor, Jay pointed out that the bank's small retail operation was now occupied by a custom tailor shop. Upstairs, we walked through an empty anteroom that had once been lined with vitrines, then headed down a long beige- carpeted corridor. James Rust, a young R.T.C. employee, emerged from a cor- ner office-formerly Rheuban's-and greeted us. Our first stop was a large storage room filled with material from the col- lection of a German physician named Peter Hackhofer. "I bought different parts of this collection from Hackhofer in several crazy transactions," Jay said. "He used to lead me on incredible goose chases all over Germany. We'd end up doing business at three in the morning on the Autobahn, halfway between Cologne and Frankfurt. We'd be pulled over to the side of the road with the- atrical posters spread out on the roof of his car. Once, I went all the way to Ger- many to buy a collection that Hackhofer was going to broker, only to find out that the owner refused to sell. Months later, in New York, I met Hackhofer at a hotel. lfL..-T He'd brought with him a hundred posters, which, because his room was so small, he spread out in the hallway He had to restrain me from at- tacking a bellboy who rolled over some of them with a luggage cart." The stor- age room contained hundreds of books, in German and French, as well as a silk pistol, a billiard-baU stand, a vanishing and appearing alarm clock, a cube- shaped metal carrying case for a spirit bell, and a paper box with a ribbon on it, which was about the size of a lady's handbag, and which Jay said was "a Victorian production reticule." I knew that I could have happIly occupied my- self there for several hours, but he seemed eager to move on, We walked down another long corridor, past the erstwhile loan-servicing and accounting departments, and came to a locked door. As Rust unlocked it, Jay looked at me with a wry, I -will-now- have-my-liver- eaten - by-vultures sort of smile. We stepped into a square room, per- haps thirty by thirty. Bookshelves and glass-enclosed cabinets lined the walls, and tables and flat files filled the interior. Separated from this room by a glass par- tition was a ten-by-twelve cubicle that had been Jay's office. It contained a desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a side table. Two automatons stood on the table. One, called "The Singing Lesson," was the creation of Jean- Eugène Robert- Houdin, the nineteenth-century watch- maker-turned-conjurer, who is consid- ered the father of modern magic. The other was a Chinese cups-and-balls con- jurer built by Robert-Houdin's father- in-law, Jacques Houdin. A large, framed color poster of Malini, advertising his "Round the World Tour," hung on the wall to the left of Jay's desk. "I heard that that poster holds some sort of special significance for you, Ricky," James Rust said. Jay responded with an opaque, queru- lous stare that said, in effect, "Hey, pal, everything in this place holds special sig- nificance for me." Along the back wall of the main room were shelved bound volumes of The Sphinx, The Wizard, The Conjurer s Monthly, The Linking Ring, The Magic Circular, Das Programm, La Prestidigita- tion, Ghost, The Magic Wand, The Gen, Mahatma, and other periodicals. I spent an hour and a half in the main room, ex- ploring the contents of the file drawers, staring into the glass display cases, pull- ing books from shelves, admiring framed lithographs, and listening to Jay. Ulti- mately, the experience was disquieting. Connected to virtually every item was a piquant vignette-a comic oddity, a compilation of historical or biographical arcana-but each digression inevitably led to a plaintive anticlimax, because the tangible artifacts had now passed from Jay's care. I paged through the scrapbook